You Have Been Watched
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[edit] Response to “You Have Been Watched” Dances between scrutiny and transubstantiation in the viewing of the transgendered body on closed circuit television.
Doran George’s article (http://www.wac.ucla.edu/extensionsjournal/v2/george.htm ) on the You Have Been Watched (YHBW) ( see http://youhavebeenwatched.org.uk/home.html ) project from 2002 bring up a number of memories for me, since I was involved in the production of the work - i designed the website and much of the project, although my involvement is nearly totally excluded from DG’s reading of the piece. I dimly recall reading it when it was originally published, but I am only responding now – some 5 years after the original piece and 3 years after the article was written, because my own ideas on the control of media are only just starting to become focussed enough for me to write this.
My own involvement in the project began through talks with Lisa Haskell at Tech2 gathering in 2001, which she helped to organise. One of the projects I found most interesting there was the Towerblock TV workshops, which offers an alternative reading, contrary to DG’s assertions that YHBW treats CCTV as a “New Media”, that the piece is about working class control of space, time, meaning and media. This view is not unique to these works and can be seen in a good number of projects which, due to their community and working class orientation have been systematically excluded from the history of art. Lisa Haskell even points this out in the the 2002 Guardian article "High rise hi-tech" <ref>http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/oct/31/newmedia.internet</ref> In this piece of writing I want to show that reading the work from this perspective gives a whole different view of the work and reveals buried layers of violence which underpin the bipolar construction of gender that DG seeks to critique.
[edit] Other - class, race and gender
DG begins the critique with a framing of the YHBW as ‘site-specific’. Just like the label of ‘new media’ , the writer seeks to frame YHBW as an ‘art work’ with a very specific history and tradition of art. He writes
“Importantly the work was site specific, i.e. made for a particular site that is not normally thought of as an appropriate environment for a piece of artwork. This forced issues of gender and transgender to be looked at in a complex engagement with working class gender culture through the body of the artist as it was located in time, space, and culture.”
It is clear here that the artist and the writer as well as the viewer are therefore coming towards the sitte / location of the work, rather than from within it. there is a bipolar separation of the site (and those who live on it) and the artist (audience and art critic). Specifically, “working class gender culture” is configured as opposed to the “body of the artist”. Time, Space and ‘culture’ are then presented as universal categories which contain all. But whose time, whose space and whose culture are we looking at here?
Later DG adds:
"What is particularly interesting about YHBW in this context is that it treats CCTV as a form of New Media, a contributor to our culture in exactly the same way that one might think of web based artwork as contributing to our culture."
We now have an assertion of ‘our culture’. In a piece where we are deliberately drawing more than a few cultures together – cultures of work, cultures of expression, cultures of production into sometimes open antagonism – as acknowledged by DG – this is a somewhat bald assertion. It becomes obvious later on whose culture we are talking about.
Dances Between Scrutiny and Transubstantiation obviously has a premise that it is opposed to ‘Working class gender culture’. It is premised on the championing of transgender as opposed to a bipolar gender essentialism. However what the piece ends up doing is pushing a different bipolar essentialism, based upon an ‘other’ class – the working class – and ultimately, an ‘other’ race – that of ‘black’ people. It can talk of transgender but cannot imagine a transracial or interracial, transclass or interclass. It sees the space of the Samuda estate as ‘other’ – but cannot imagine a transpacial / interspacial , a transnational or international critique.
[edit] The artists
While I was an artist working on the project and indeed introduced the idea of working on the Samuda estate due to my own connections with people there, I was in a way seen as a technical worker rather than an artist. This was partly my own decision, but partly because I was fulfilling roles that are not conventionally seen as creative, but rather as a worker - and it lead me to being quite marginalised in the decision making process - with a polarity between artist and other workers being formed. This fits in very well with DG's cultural elitist views on 'our' culture (of art) as opposed to working class culture.
The quote from Lisa regarding the residents of the estate making connections between “rituals of public exposure and humiliation” shows the awareness of residents on the use of media and its control. In fact, the control of the CCTV cameras was, at the time of the making of YHBW under debate, with the Metropolitan Police trying to take control of all estates CCTV s at a central Police HQ in Newham – another borough altogether.
Later, Lisa is quoted as observing some young residents on the estate. “…But I do remember that the kids weren’t white” The racial makeup of the artists – mostly white, with the exception of myself – is for the first time touched upon – although indirectly. However the issue is connected quite clearly to the violence engendered in the performance. Here then is a racial bipolarism that the artists are quite aware of.
Another factor to be considered is the fact that those who were vocal in attacking the artists were very young people – another group of people who anre marginalised and made to be less than human by the state – ie not granted full rights.
DG quotes Graham Bell as being threatened by the CCTVs on one hand and protected on the other, as a transgender performer. Both of these views can be expressed by the working class, black or indeed the young residents of the estate. DG and the artist also express how YHBW is an attempt to reassert the human rights of the transgender performer. The same is also true for the working class or the black resident. It is historical fact that black people have not been recognised as humans by the European ruling class for centuries.
While the whiteness of the performers is never really expressed in DGs critique he does touch upon the maleness of Bell,. In particular with reference to the process of transgression and transubstantiation. Besides the obvious imagery of a male messiah, he is elucidating a very specific form of transgenderism – that of a male to female (“I know that I have a male body…”). In fact, given his references to “medical discourse” it is in fact a specifically a white, male trangenderism - and given the bipolarity of ‘art’ discourse mentioned above, a bourgeois transgenderism.
Outside of these bipolarisms which necessarily make up the culture of DG – which he presumably shares with the artists, there are ‘other’ transgenders – eg the existence of working class transgender politics, of Indian transgender performers and African transgendered. Furthermore, there is the transgendered who do not go from male or female into the other – but those who constitute the ‘other’ to start with.
the bipolarity of scrutiny and transsubstantiation – is no bipolarity at all because both performances require a position of power – to scrutinise the other – or transubstantiate one object into another. The dance is therefore not just on the grave of the other’s self empowerment, it is also on the grave of the self’s empowerment and into a 2 dimensional caricature of real desires and feelings.
[edit] Real engagement against the polarisation of artist/ audience
Certainly a great deal of the blame lies on my own shoulders for not attending the sessions where the 'artists' engaged with the 'residents'. We had originally planned that the residents of the estate would be involved at every stage of the production, in the end there were only 2 or 3 superficially engaging meetings and I was not present at most of them, only the original meetings with the residents associations. I completely missed the meetings and workshop planned at the youth centre. While my own presence may not have guaranteed a more even engagement between the various agents involved I do think it would have helped. In the end the scripting and main parts in the film were given to 'artists' and 'actors' brought in from outside the estate – something that I think was a fatal flaw in the piece.
If the artists had really engaged other people into the scripting and themes, even just talked to residents about homphobia before hand, they would certainty have been aware of a protest by Peter Thatchell and Outrage! which occurred not 2 weeks before the YHBW shoot, on 1st October, at the Music Of Black Origins (MOBO) award ceremony at nearby London Arena – just two minutes walk from the Samuda estate. Placards included “Black singers! Stop bashing gays!” and “MOBO = Music Of Bigoted Origin”. The equation of “Black” with “Bigoted” and a blanket appeal to all 'black singers' to stop 'bashing gays' is clearly racist.
Thatchells article about the protest on the website “flameout.org” also reflect this obvious weakness in their campaign. He specifically claims that the BBC have never shown white supremacist views on cultural grounds. This is blatantly false and most of us know that the BBC has a very racist history which includes controversies such as the Black and White Minstrel Show to more recent airings of the BNP and other white supremacists in for example the White season. Thatchell's racism is clearer later in the article when he compares the killing of gay men in Jamaica to the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The actions in Jamaica have not been conducted – supported maybe but not carried out – by the state. Just like gay men being killed in England – these actions are not carried out directly by the state. And he should be aware of the level of psychopathic violence against gays in this country because he himself is quoted in the 2005 BBC article “Gay man's killing 'tip of the iceberg'” which reported on the killing of barman Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in October 2005. Thatchell also claims that in “Britain” there are no “ no openly gay black super stars”. Well, don't tell Justin Fashanu who was the first professional footballer to declare his homosexuality and whose career was derailed by homophobia in English football. And while Thatchell then makes a reformist defence of 'freedom of speech' – on his terms – he ends his article with an appeal to the House of Lords Select Committee – another appeal to established white, adult, male power for more state control over the situation. So we know whose terms are his terms.
It is the Jamican Gay group J-Flag that in their article on the Thatchell protest identify a clue to the roots of the psychopathy engendered in the situation. They write regarding Ted Brown – an gay activist from jamaica:
“Ted Brown was last in Jamaica a few years back. Its the only place I've ever been to where I had to go back into the closet, he says. That's after 35 years of being out. Brown sees several factors informing Jamaican homophobia. One is the macho desires of a lot of black men. They feel that being a black man requires them to be ultra masculine and one way of establishing this is to denigrate those who don't qualify. “
This goes back to the bipolarity of male/female that the transgendered is perhaps seeking to transcend. The appeal to human rights outlined in bourgeois art and politics however comes undone at this very point where human reproduction is clearly a superior form of creation to bourgeois production or artistic representation. And while the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, articles 16[I] and 16 [III]) states that “Men and women of full age without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion have the right to marry and to found a family ... the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society." the 'right' to a family is not really extended fully to gay men or women. It was precisely this situation that Peter Thatchells most well known campaign against the Church of England was addressing. The ability of people to live and love together and to bring up children together. The issue is still of course very controversial in the church – especially in the USA. However, in appealing to the established institutions of white male power, Thatchell's campaign overlooks the real situation in many peoples lives – especially those outside the church and outside white power – ie outside his own cultural spheres.
If we consider bourgeois cultural assumptions on 'human nature' which place intellectual efforts above physical efforts we can see that the continutation of bourgeois chauvinism against working classes, non-Europeans and indeed gay and transgendered people which follows a monotheistic denigration of sexual pleasure as 'animalistic'.
The history of anti-black racism and white supremacism is precisely based on reproductive control – most notoriously in South Africa and USA where laws have been passed to stop interracial reproduction. This has also been historically justified on the grounds of black people being not only a different race but a different species. In doing so, black men and women were denied their own humanity. This is one of the historical causes of an over-compensation in defending the power to reproduction – as a male or as a female – which is not just found in some modern, proletarian black culture but also often in many working class proletarian cultural situations generally.
For me, it was after one of the male actors – who happened also to be gay - was sent to hospital after being injured in a chase during the filming that I realised things were out of hand. Instead of addressing problems as they were happening, however, the artists continued with the performance as scripted. It was perhaps at this point that we should have taken stock of the situation and re-planned and renegotiated the script and boundaries of the work. Crucially, the residents should have been more involved at every stage of the production. I was unhappy with the ‘release forms’ and refused to sign one. The problem of control was again ignored. Residents control of the project and the film was one of the main aims of the project as far as I was concerned and the residents clearly did not feel in control of the situation and expressed their frustration.
DG ends his critique with the idea that the CCTV monitor is most graphical in showing the fall of the male cross-dresser as riot police arrives to avert the erasure of the transgender body. I feel that the blood flowing from a fellow workers face is a far more graphic display of this – it is the real consequence of the decisions made, the blood and not wine or representation. The arrival of the police just shows once again how the police provide the power of the bourgeois white artist over those cast as other as either ‘black’, ‘working class’ or for that matter any other type of ‘transgender’ which is outside of that constituted by bourgeois, white, male power.
[edit] References
<references></references>
You Have Been Watched http://youhavebeenwatched.org.uk/
Press release from Samuda Estate http://www.undo.net/cgi-bin/undo/pressrelease/pressrelease.pl?id=1034347314
“You Have Been Watched” Dances between scrutiny and transubstantiation in the viewing of the transgendered body on closed circuit television. by Doran George http://www.wac.ucla.edu/extensionsjournal/v2/george.htm
Murder In The Caribbean Caribbean - Jamaica Saturday, 09 September 2006 21:27 from JFLAG http://www.ukblackout.com/news-mainmenu-84/caribbean/162-jamaica/60-murder-in-the-caribbean.html
http://www.soulrebels.org/dancehall/v_outrage169.htm Mobo awards marred by anti-gay violence Outrage! News Service October 2, 2002
Reggae Singers urge: Kill Queers PETER TATCHELL http://www.flameout.org/flameout/presentday/lyrics.html
Black Gay British Leaders
http://rodonline.typepad.com/rodonline/2006/02/black_gay_briti.html
Gay man's killing 'tip of the iceberg' By Martha Buckley BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5080164.stm
